Speaker for the Dead

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to domestic violence, incest, and suicidal ideation.

A group of Brazilian Catholic humans from planet Baía colonized the planet Lusitania, which was inhabited by a race of primitive intelligent beings—porquinhos, later called pequeninos and piggies. Starship Congress, the intergalactic rulers of humanity, sanctioned the colonization under the pretense that the pequeninos were to be left alone. Many saw this as a chance to make up for the genocide of the formics—or pejoratively, the buggers—an insect-like alien lifeform that, according to public knowledge, had been completely eradicated by Ender.

Valentine Wiggin, using her pseudonym Demosthenes, writes that the pequeninos are raman. Living beings are defined as utlanning, or humans from the same world; framling, or humans from a different planet; raman (plural ramen), or friendly sentient alien species, and varelse, or animals with which humans cannot communicate or compromise.

Pipo and Libo, Pipo’s son and apprentice, speak with the pequeninos, and Rooter, one of the pequeninos, is frustrated that Pipo is forbidden to discuss human culture. Pipo and Libo return to the lab at the Zenador’s Station. Dona Cristã, a member of the Catholic order the Children of the Mind of Christ, is waiting for Pipo to discuss Novinha.